Kurimoto Joun had a career unlike that of any other shogunal official of the last years of the shogunate. He was born in the third month of 1822 at Urasarugaku-chō in Kanda Ogawa-chō, Edo, the third child of Kitamura Kaien, a physician to the shogun's household. It is a corner not far from Kanda Surugadai, where the Oguri house stood. His given name was Kon, his pen name Hōan. He was called Tetsuzō at first, then Kitamura Zuiken; on succeeding to the Kurimoto house he became Sehei, and later Aki-no-kami. “Joun” was the name he went by after he gave up office at the Restoration.
He coughed blood from childhood, and his family, it is said, did not press him to study. When the bleeding stopped in 1838, at seventeen, he went to Asaka Gonsai's school, and later entered the Shōheikō. In 1843, at twenty-two, he passed the kōshi kōka, the examination for appointment as a shogunal official, and was rewarded by the shogunate with fifteen bars of silver. Iwase Tadanari passed in the same year. He was a big man of imposing appearance, and people are said to have called him “Kitamura the monster”.
The boy five years his junior, met at Gonsai's school
Oguri Tadamasa began going to Asaka Gonsai's school in 1834, at six years old, so it is said. There he came to know Kurimoto Sehei, five years his elder. Sakamoto Fujiyoshi describes Kurimoto as “imposing to look at, but a gentle-hearted and able man who hated anything crooked”, and writes that the friendship between the two began then and did not change in all their lives.
The first half of Kurimoto's life did not go smoothly. In the same year that he passed the kōshi kōka he fell foul of the rules of the Shōheikō and was expelled, and the road to a post among the reform-minded foreign affairs officials was closed. Then a secret trial ride on the shogunate's warship Kankō Maru angered his superiors; he was dismissed, driven out of Edo and sent to serve in Ezo. He spent six years at Hakodate, where he laid out a garden of medicinal plants, among other works.
That demotion came to matter greatly later. At Hakodate Kurimoto met a French Jesuit priest, Mermet de Cachon, and learned French from him in exchange for teaching him Japanese. After four years of this, Cachon was called back to France. Kurimoto was soon made a group head under the Hakodate commissioner, recalled to Edo, and went from superintendent of the Shōheikō to inspector (metsuke), with charge of foreign affairs. He took up the inspector's post on the last day of the sixth month of 1864, then forty-three, and with Takemoto Awaji-no-kami was entrusted with the negotiations to close the ports.
At Yokohama Kurimoto met an old acquaintance again where he had not expected to: beside the newly arrived French minister, Léon Roches, stood Cachon as interpreter.
The repair of the Shōkaku Maru, and a street corner in Yokohama
About that time the Shōkaku Maru, a ship of the shogunate's own, was damaged. The senior councillors called Kurimoto in and told him to sound Roches out on whether French engineers could repair her. Roches took it on willingly, and in a little over sixty days the work was done. The finish astonished Kurimoto himself: it was perfect.
It was the middle of the twelfth month of 1864, a clear but windy day. Kurimoto was on his way back from the Shōkaku Maru through the customs house to his official residence at Honmoku when two horses came up behind him at a gallop, kicking up the dust. As he was about to turn into a side street, a loud voice stopped him.
“Sehei, Sehei! Neatly done. I admire it, I admire it!”
It was Oguri Kōzukenosuke and his retainer. Oguri had gone that day to deal with the British Oriental Bank. The errand was one a subordinate could have run, but he went himself, it is said, “for fear it would come to nothing”. The business done, he walked on to the Shōkaku Maru, and finding Kurimoto gone, went down into the bottom of the ship to look her over.
The iron pipe had come in good time, Oguri said. Kurimoto answered that the pipe aboard the French warship was too large to use, and that on hearing there was some at Shanghai he had sent for it by the first ship. Orders from abroad needed the approval of Oguri's office, but there was no time to wait on a council, so he had settled it himself without leave, resolved to treat it as the final account of work done under contract. Oguri praised him: “admirable.” Kaionji Chōgorō comments that the exchange shows “a temper that thought nothing of ignoring procedure”.
What came of that talk in the street was the beginning of the great work of Oguri's life. He wanted to put to use the steam-powered iron- and shipbuilding machinery the Saga domain had presented to the shogunate, and asked whether the French engineers who had repaired the Shōkaku Maru might take a little more trouble over it — all of it brought up, Oguri being Oguri, “as casually as that”. By Kurimoto's own account, “I had not even heard the word dock before, let alone known anything about an ironworks”. Even so, Kurimoto suggested going to the legation that very night, and the two took lodgings at Kanagawa and called on Roches together before the night was out.
The Yokosuka ironworks, and “a house for sale with a storehouse attached”
In 1865 eight shogunal officials were ordered to put up the Yokosuka ironworks. Besides Oguri, the names were Kurimoto Aki-no-kami, Kinoshita Kingo, Asano Iga-no-kami, Yamaguchi Suruga-no-kami and Shibata Hyūga-no-kami. The plan was to finish one ironworks, two docks large and small, and three shipyards in four years, at 600,000 dollars a year. The man who interpreted the text of the agreement and took it down was Mermet de Cachon, Kurimoto's fellow student from his Hakodate years.
The plan met fierce opposition inside the shogunate. To spend the country's funds on a leisurely great work at a time when government was in difficulty was dangerous, it was said. Even Kurimoto, Oguri's right arm, once remonstrated with him to give it up. What Oguri answered then were the famous words.
“Even if the house of Tokugawa must wrap up its shogunate in gift paper and present it to another, is it not the better thing that it be a house for sale with a storehouse attached?” (Hōan Ikō)
Looking back on those words in later years, Kurimoto wrote that there was in them “something infinitely to be pitied”. How matters stood in the shogunate's kitchen can be seen from another of Kurimoto's posthumous pieces, Shimonoseki Shōkin no Tenmatsu (the whole story of the Shimonoseki indemnity). At the end of 1864, when the first instalment of 500,000 dollars of the Shimonoseki indemnity had to be handed over from Oguri's hand, the shogunate's treasury held only 240,000 in Bunkyū coin.
In the shogunate's last days Oguri picked Kurimoto out, made him commissioner of foreign affairs and sent him to France. When power was returned to the emperor, Kurimoto was far away in France. He came home in the month after Oguri was beheaded at the village of Gonda.
After the Restoration, to the world of the press
After the Restoration Kurimoto flatly refused to take office, and wrote as a reporter for the Yūbin Hōchi Shinbun. “On the management of Yokosuka”, in which he set down how the ironworks came to be built, is thought to have been written in those Hōchi Shinbun years, about 1873 or 1874. The pity is that the documents from the time of the building were all thrown into the fire: Kurimoto himself writes that he “judged wrongly”, thinking there was no telling what trouble keeping them by him might bring.
Among the younger men at the Hōchi Shinbun were Inukai Tsuyoshi, Hara Takashi and Ozaki Yukio. Inukai called Kurimoto “teacher” all his life and himself “a disciple”, and in the third month of 1892 wrote a short life of him, Kurimoto Joun Sensei Den-ryaku. Ozaki's pen name Gakudō is said to have been given him by Kurimoto. Kurimoto Joun died in 1897 at his own house in Honjo, Tokyo, and his heir Shūjirō brought out his collected essays, Hōan Ikō (his posthumous papers).
At the Yokosuka naval arsenal in the Shōwa era a portrait of Joun hung high in the great dining hall. And at Tōzenji in Gonda in Jōshū, the bust of Oguri Kōzukenosuke by Asakura Fumio and the figure of his friend Kurimoto Joun stand facing each other. The two who met at Asaka Gonsai's school stand in the same temple grounds still.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (including quotations from Hōan Ikō); Ōtsubo Motoji, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa Kakei oyobi Ryaku-nenpu (the genealogy and short chronology of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa), Oguri Kō Kenshōkai, 1957
→ Friendship with Kurimoto Joun, and the repair of the Shōkaku